News digest 17 November 2014

News digest 17 November 2014

17 November 2014

Today’s digest opens with a splash in the FT as Unite general secretary Len McCluskey lays down the anti-cuts argument saying Unite members will campaign against further attempts to cut public spending after the general election. That comes after last week’s expose by the FT of the latest plan by the Tories to slash another £48 billion from government spending. Said Len: “The level of the cuts in my view is unsustainable … for a cohesive society in a civilised 21st century country, then you cannot embark upon the type of cuts that cut away at the very fabric of the communities in which we all live.” Len then went on to castigate prime minister David Cameron as a “child of Thatcherism” delivering extremely right wing polices and slammed the PM for repeatedly ignoring and attacking unions. Added Len: “Why try to isolate a section of society when you’re supposed to be governing for everyone … it’s got no intellectual sense to it.” [Cameron, intellectual and sense? Now, there are words you rarely see together]…

And for an example of Cameron’s contempt for trade unions look no further than the G20 where he refused to meet trade unions that wanted to raise concerns about the TTIP trade deal [good for rabid capitalists, bad for the rest of us]. Instead, the Guardian has a piece by the prime minister warning of the threat to global growth after his G20 junket in Brisbane, Australia. Cameron says that “red warning lights are flashing again” and says that the state of the global economy is on a knife edge – although he hails the UK economy as one that has created 1.75 million jobs [95% part time though] and says the deficit is going down [really?], however David Blanchflower in the Indie says pay will not rise until 2016 at the earliest and for once the comment from John Prescott is quite apt, namely Cameron’s pushing a “long term economic scam” as his reverse Robin Hood takes cash from the poor to give tax cuts to the rich, there’s only one way to stop the austerity addiction, and that’s to get rid of the Con-Dem coalition, sadly it looks like people may vote Ukip in the Rochester by-election, but for an example of the party just look at the Mirror which says that three supposed ‘Ukip members’ overturned a stall and attacked a disabled campaigner out to save the NHS, sums up Ukip’s approach to one of the country’s greatest ever achievements, you can’t trust the Tories [or the turbocharged Ukip defectors]…